http://www.e27.sg/2010/07/23/koprol-could-cut-distribution-deal-with-nexian/

I guess if I get followed into Apple today people must think I am cutting a deal with Jobs?

http://home.singtel.com/bbmobile/signup-ipad

getting the site map for page not found!

Nokia converged mobile device (smartphone and mobile computer) volumes came in at 24 million units, a bit more than a quarter of total devices volume, up 42% year-on-year and 12% sequentially.

However:

A recent developer survey from Open-First reveals that Nokia’s Ovi Store is lagging in several key areas with nearly 20 percent of the participants unlikely to use Nokia’s app store in the future. Although the majority of developers surveyed will continue to support Nokia’s ecosystem, more than 42 percent said Ovi is below average when compared to other app stores, such as those from Apple and Google. These responses indicate that Nokia doesn’t only have to play catch up with its smartphone operating system strategy, but also with the marketplace that’s helping to power device sales.

This is the scary part:

And now consider the next shocking chart.  Apple will generate 2X as much handset profit as the rest of the industry combined this year DESPITE SELLING ONLY 3% OF THE HANDSETS BY UNIT VOLUME.

I didn’t realize so many people were after Palm. Nokia, RIM and MSFT could have used it. Nokia more than any of them.

Urinals:

Krug scrambled to counter the plumbers’ public health claims. He hired Charles Gerba, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona. Gerba studies “filth, pestilence, and disease,” with an emphasis on the bathroom, and says he has done more field studies on the toilet than anyone else in academia. From his point of view, there was a clear explanation for the plumbers’ resistance: It drained their wallets. “Plumbers don’t like the waterless urinal because it cuts down on their work tremendously,” he says. “There’s no more piping to install, and the urinals have no moving parts to repair.”

To test the plumbers’ assertions, Gerba compared a traditional flush urinal with the Falcon waterless. He found that the Falcon urinal presented a less hospitable environment for germs than constantly moistened conventional bowls. The process of flushing could actually eject those germs into the air. “If it’s a traditional urinal, you should flush and run,” Gerba says.

Another reference to the Shallows.

These guys are amazing:

Penn says we should compare their relationship not to a loveless marriage but to that of “two guys manning a 7/11 down the street. If they aren’t best buddies what do they care, as long as the coffee machine is working and the shelves are stacked? Teller and I work together every day, but socially we go out together maybe only once a year.”

I talked about AVH last time and now his company is picked up by Flipboard:

The first version of Flipboard just hit the Apple app store tonight, but the next version will be even more interesting, as it will be powered by the relevance engine built by Ellerdale. In recent weeks, Flipboard acquired Ellerdale, which had developed a set of real-time search and discovery tools based on Twitter. Ellerdale co-founder and CTO Arthur van Hoff has joined Flipboard as CTO.

This has me laughing my ass off:

After Revel ruled that Lohan had violated her probation in a 2007 drunken driving conviction by missing weekly alcohol counseling sessions, Lohan began sobbing as she addressed the court. “I did do everthing that I was told to do and did the best I could,” she said.

This looks like a slick app:

With the success of our iPad/iPhone offerings, our revenues for the past 12 months have crossed the $1M mark. We’re very proud of what we’ve built, and while we don’t believe revenues alone are a mark of success, we feel that they are a testament to the fact that our customers appreciate the work we’ve done, and believe that we do provide a unique solution that is built with quality.

Good to see you making some editorial/newsy strides with the new Upshot – but I must say that Alan Soon and team in Singapore did this first.

Prince just keeps getting weirder:

He says: “The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.

“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.

Singapore and Echelon still getting some love – nice!

kpis for office boy
sales kpi apple
mobile kpi
kpis of 7/11
we have no kpis
kpi for creative people
keyperformanceindicators
key performance indicators for coffee sh
kpi for startup
ui of kpi
kpi
key performance indicators kpi
useless key performance indicators
kpis for startups
key performance indicators
nokpis

http://thisweekinasia.net/2010/07/this-week-in-asia-episode-58-live-from-open-web-asia-sea/

Also a video this time – loving my footwear:

http://satoo.tv/vidid/70

laterz!

Before I get to Nokia  – a few other things…

Diaspora – I am really pulling for these guys. Not just because of FB hate but I like the model of doing product development in the open:

People have been asking us almost every day what our development schedule is, and when we plan to finish exactly, and the honest truth is we don’t have an exact day. With one week “sprints,” lots of end-to-end, user driven features are being added every day. We try and “theme” our months to be features around a given area.

Will this work ? :

In another groundbreaking move, The Guardian newspaper in Britain has launched a plugin for the popular blog-publishing tool WordPress (see disclosure below) that allows web sites to embed the full text of Guardian news stories and other content for free. The plugin comes with a catch though: Sites also have to embed the newspaper’s advertising. The new tool is part of an ambitious program of opening the paper up to the web — a move that got its start in May of this year when The Guardian launched its “open platform,” which allows developers to use the publisher’s open API to create apps and services that include the newspaper’s content.

This shit is so good:

My own Facebook birthday was a complete disaster. I’ve been logging on to the site since before they opened it up to the general public and I swear, I’m well-liked on the outside. But when my birthday arrived, there was nothing more than a couple messages from those two friends everyone has who always comment on everything anyone posts. I expected my Facebook wall to look like Vanity Fair’s Oscar Party, and instead I got a panoramic shot from the now abandoned set of Deadwood. And this rebuff came only a couple months after I had to watch my wife my scroll the length of the Torah to get through her Facebook birthday wishes.

This ain’t half bad either – is Social Networking ruining humanity?

The US is so screwed, I mean that is what it feels like:

By contrast, China’s fiscal stimulus has been more effective, partly because China is at a different stage of its development. Citizens of Beijing can now use subways to go 50 kilometres to the summer palace for almost nothing, while residents of Shanghai are making plans to walk along West Lake in Hangzhou, getting there on the new super fast train. In short, parts of China have a first world infrastructure that will help to stimulate domestic demand and more balanced regional development. Unfortunately, the US fiscal spending plan more closely resembles that of Japan than China – and is likely to have the same minimal or even counter-productive impact. Away from home, American citizens are increasingly voting with their feet. In Hong Kong, so many US passport holders fear the deluge of US taxes that will inevitably follow the spending binge that it can now apparently take as much as 11 months to secure an appointment at the US consulate to surrender US citizenship.

Nokia – I think about it all the time as it is and then my buddy Pak Budi writes this:

Let’s see how this new platform works and how the market reacts. Since I will attend the Nokia World 2010 in London, September 14-15, so hopefully I would hear Nokia’s latest strategy and could see their new MeeGo devices. Come on, Nokia. This is your (last) chance to impress the smart-phone world! At least, trying to convince me that you have better device and platform.

But it gets worse:

I can’t continue to support a manufacturer who puts out such craptastic ‘flagships’ as the N97, and who expects me to use services that even most of Nokia’s own employees don’t use. I also can’t continue to support a mobile operating system platform that continually buries itself into oblivion by focusing on ‘openness’ while keeping a blind eye towards the obvious improvements that other open platforms have had for several iterations.

This part is so spot on:

To Nokia, you guys are losing. Hard. Wake the hell up. Doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results is the definition of insanity.  I’ve been a huge Nokia fan since my 2nd cellphone, and I just can’t do it any longer. You guys aren’t competing like you once were, and everyone but you seems to see that. You used to build the world’s best smartphones, the world’s best cameras, the world’s best GPS units – you’ve lost pretty much all of that, and with nothing to show for it. You unveiled your Ovi vision over 2 years ago – I was there. Today, it’s still a complete mess. I have to log in every single time I visit the site – regardless of how many times I check the ‘remember me’ box. I spent 6 months (and about 3 hours at Nokia World 2009) trying to find someone to help me with Ovi Contacts on the web – no one knew who to point me to. You spent millions of dollars purchasing your Ovi pieces – Ovi Files, Ovi Share, and a host of other little companies – are you proud of what you ‘built’ with them? Most of your own employees (that I’ve talked to) don’t even use them, so why should I?

If Nokia thinks a blog post like this is going to help – think again:

Symbian and MeeGo are the best software for our smartest devices. As such, we have no plans to use any other software. Despite rumors to the contrary, there are no plans to introduce an Android device from Nokia. There has also been some confusion about Symbian and Nseries. The Nokia N8 will be our only Nseries device on Symbian^3. Of course, we ‘never comment on future products’, but a Symbian^4 Nseries device is a strong possibility. A very strong possibility

Some flickr sets:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aryokresnadi/sets/72157624417671126/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kembaren/sets/72157624418464596/

Okay. My celeb life over and back to the grind!

and then Startup Digest PH interviews a weirdo…

peace!

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously. But here’s what I’d do after that: grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70’s, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.

Nokia. What can one say then wow how the mighty have fallen. We can say all we want that they have he feature phone market or they own rural india but the problem they are not in the growth markets. And if they ever did adopt android that would have to be admitting defeat – no?

I think the iPhone 4 is going to crush it. People I know who never even wanted one think they have to have one now. My friends or family who have old iPhones were considering something from android – not now. I think the defining innovation for this phone will be Facetime.

Curated app stores, despite app developers bitching, seems to be better:

Overall we estimate that $6,000,000 has been paid out to developers for games, and $15,000,000 has been paid out on apps. That is a total of $21,000,000, almost 50x lower than the amount paid out to devs on iPhone.

This really indicates how much of a cottage industry the paid Android Market remains, with insufficient sales numbers to warrant full-time labor for paid content. Other approaches, such as ad-supported apps, may prove to be more sustainable.

Congrats to Flickr on their new look and the kudos it is ganering:

For those using Flickr every day, such quirks will quickly fade and there’s no doubt that the redesign is a vast improvement. Flickr also claims that page load times are faster, though we didn’t notice a huge difference while previewing the test site. Still, loading a larger photo without slowing down the page will likely be good enough for most users.

Required reading:

Pixar’s approach to creativity is striking for two reasons. The first is that the company puts people before projects. Most Hollywood studios start by hunting down promising ideas and then hire creative teams to turn them into films. The projects dictate whom they hire. Pixar starts by bringing in creative people and then encourages them to generate ideas. One of its most successful recruits has been Brad Bird, who has presided over two Oscar-winning feature films, “The Incredibles” (in which he also provided a character’s voice) and “Ratatouille”.